Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (6 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

 
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my life has been the discovery that there is always a better lover than the last" (p. 55).
This portion of
The Rules of Life
engages and subverts some of the earliest versions of "Little Red Riding Hood." In the late-seventeenth-century version as recorded by Charles Perrault, the story of the little girl encountering the wolf in the forest had distinct overtones of sexual initiation and was meant as a warning to trusting, gullible young girls. The color of the girl's red cape has thus been linked by some to the blood of forced sexual encounter. Weldon reverses the moral purpose of the tale and prepares for Gabriella's delight in her first sexual experience with an episode she recalls from her childhood. At a children's mass that she attends, the priest tells a parable about a party at a castle to which only those children were admitted who were dressed in spotless white. A little girl who stains her dress by eating blackberries (like Eve and the forbidden fruit) is excluded from the "endless bliss" of the castle, and the priest warns his young listeners not to "be like the little girl who in her wilfulness stained her purity" (p. 24). At the age of five, Gabriella has already made up her mind on the issue of purity, especially because she senses that the priest, "with his little piggy eyes and his soft mouth," would like to get his ''fat white hand" under her dress, and she deliberately spills ink on her white dress. If "purity" leads to the likes of the priest, "I wanted to be stained" (p. 24).
In an even more sweeping way than
Female Friends
or
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The Rules of Life
turns on the concept of fiction itself, of which fairy tales are a part. In the futuristic world of this short novel, technology and skepticism hold sway, and the dominant ideology is the "Great New Fictional Religion." The fact that the deity of this religion, the "Great Screenwriter in the Sky," is known to have had "many a bad idea in his time" (p. 13) prevents its adherents from taking much of anything at face value; the priest of this religion who serves as the primary narrator of the novel can foresee the advent of the
Revised
Great New Fictional Religion, which would hold the Great Screenwriter to higher standards than his current B-grade movie tendencies.
The most
un
virtuous Gabriella Sumpter has in fact practiced the only virtue possible for one with such a second-rate deity: she has, according to the narrator, followed the script the Screenwriter has written for her. "Virtue," he comments, "lies in consenting to the parts allotted to us, and ... just as some can't help being victims others can't help being oppressors, and ... the best we can do is to help the Great Plot of life go forward, with all its myriad, myriad subplots" (p. 21). Life itself is thus a scripted fiction within which, as Gemma says in
Words of Advice,
"we all have to place ourselves as best we can." Gabriella has played the role of mistress
 
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to a succession of men; beginning as a potential beggar-girl, she has risen to the role of princess, though never marrying the prince in question.
At the same time, however, Weldon provides ample evidence that Gabriella's story is a tale no more true than any fairy tale. Gabriella herself signals her own unreliability by referring to her story as "fiction" and warning the priest who transcribes her tape that there are no rules in fiction, thus granting herself the freedom of the storyteller. "I have," she remarks, "or had in my life, no particular appetite for truth'' (p. 17). Further, the priest several times doubts the accuracy of the tape recording, acknowledging that the "Technology of Truth" is "in its infancy, not its maturity" (p. 16). Finally, the story of the dead is refuted by the living. Timothy Tovey, said by Gabriella to have been the most devoted of her lovers, denies to the priest having seen her in the twenty years before being summoned to her deathbed. "Did she tell you the truth?" Tovey inquires of the priest. "I doubt it" (p. 77). The closest Gabriella has come to royalty is to have lived, as Tovey's mistress, in a house "in the keeping of the Royal Family to dispose of as they want" (p. 17).
Yet unlike Ruth, in
She-Devil,
who ends by inhabiting another woman's story, tower, and even her body, Gabriella is her own creation. In her own tale she is, unlike Red Riding Hood, unafraid of the wolf, and in the end she chooses the role of a Sleeping Beauty who does not wait for the kiss of a prince, but instead captivates the priest who transcribes her story, as if to prove her claim to the part of the irresistible princess.
There may be no rules in fiction, but there are rules in life, Gabriella Sumpter maintains as she distills the "valid rules" from her experience. In a similar spirit of instruction, Gemma passes along "words of advice" in Weldon's novel with that phrase as its title. Like Gwyneth's aphorisms and Gabriella's rules, Gemma's "words" are suspect, arising as they do from the fairy tale that she inhabits as an antidote to reality.
Words of Advice
tells of three womenGemma, Elsa, and Janicewho must extricate themselves from the mythologies on which they have patterned their behavior and expectations. Instead of palimpsestic images, as they are in
The Rules of Life,
fairy tales are in this novel used overtly as elements of the plot. Elsa tells fairy tales to her brothers and sisters and comes to see herself in terms of the tales, Gemma tells Elsa her own life as a fairy tale in order to save her from ignorance, and Janice awakens from her grim existence as the discarded wife. Transformations abound amid resonances of Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, and Sleeping Beauty.
Young Elsa, secretary to and mistress of Victor, Janice's estranged husband, is compounded of Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin, narrowly escaping the fates of all three. Arriving at the
 
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home of Hamish and Gemma for the weekend, Elsa finds herself consigned to a high room where she is expected to type inventories of the antiques that the wealthy Hamish will sell to Victor. No more able to type well than she is to spin straw into gold, Elsa is rescued by Hamish-as-Rumpelstiltskin in exchange for sexual favors; here, that is, Rumpelstiltskin not only demands the girl's first-born child, but intends to father it himself. Simultaneously, Elsa as Red Riding Hood is willingly pursued by Victor-as-wolf, a reference that Weldon confirms by several times echoing the language of the tale. Following their predinner lovemaking, for example, Victor prepares to leave Elsa, "the better to change for dinner" (p. 9).
Elsa's youthful innocence is counterpointed to Gemma's cynicism. Whereas nineteen-year-old Elsa is vulnerable to the snares set for fairy-tale heroines, Gemma has willfully constructed her own history to resemble a fairy tale rather than the unglamorous truth that she has married the frog instead of the prince. Gemma recognizes in Elsa the naivete of her own youthful self; what she does not recognize until the end of the novel is that she is just as ensnared in fiction as Elsa is. Early in the novel, Gemma signals their similarity when she says to Elsa, "I have a story to tell. It's a fairy tale. I love fairy tales, don't you?" When Elsa responds that she does, Gemma says, "I thought you would" (p. 20). The tale Gemma then tells concerns the betrothal of Mr. Fox to Lady Mary, who, on the eve of their wedding, discovers Mr. Fox eating human flesh and carries home as evidence a finger with a ring on it. Her brothers kill Mr. Fox to save her from a horrible fate.
The tale is one that Gemma heard on the train on her way to London as a young girl, and she believes that the hearing of it predestined her to fall in love with a Mr. Fox. "Fairy tales," she tells Elsa, "are lived out daily" (p. 21), and the story of her own life that she tells Elsa intermittently during the rest of the novel is as fabricated as the tale of Lady Mary and Mr. Fox that she had heard on the radiofabricated to explain her missing finger and inability to walk as well as the loss of her prince, Mr. Fox. Only at the end does Hamish tell the truth that frees both Gemma and Elsa: Mr. Fox, his business partner, was a homosexual; rather than being severed by Mr. Fox, Gemma's finger was caught in an elevator door and subsequently amputated; and the paralysis of Gemma's legs is emotional, induced by her realization that she has been betrayed by the prince and has married the frog. Stripped of her fairy tale, Gemma is able to walk, and exhorts Elsa to run away from fairy tales: "Run, Elsa! Run for all you're worth. Don't fall. Please don't fall, the way I did.... You must run for me and all of us" (p. 233).
Victor's wife, Janice, is in thrall to the more prosaic cultural mythology
 
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of the ideal wife, as defined by Victor. She is to be Snow White, the eternal virgin, "someone as pure and helpful as his own mother" (p. 154). But the mask of wifely respectability she assumes according to his wishes hardens as it obscures her individuality. Finally, she has become a type rather than a person, as Weldon's narrator sarcastically notes:
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is no woman, but a housewife. And what a housewife! Note her rigid, mousy curls, kept stiff by spray; her quick eyes, which search for dust and burning toast, and not the appraisal or enquiry of the opposite sex; the sharp voice, growing sharper, louder, year by year: at home in a bus queue or ordering groceries or rebuking the garbage, but hardly in the bed. Does that suit you, Victor?
No. [Pp. 15455]
Bored by his own creation, Victor turns to Elsa, but he returns to Janice once she is rejuvenated by an affair with a Polish carpenter and her own daughter's involvement with an American student. The carpenter's wife laments the separation of women required by male fantasies"I only wish women would stick together a bit" (p. 160)and Gemma echoes the same sentiment when she says, "If only ... we women could learn from one another" (p. 183).
Gemma's statement is both plaintive and ironic, reminding us that women in Weldon's fiction
do
learn from each othersometimes the wrong things, such as Gwyneth's old wives' tales and Mary Fisher's romances, and sometimes the right things, the "words of advice" that cut through the bonds of myths and fairy tales. Weldon's critique of the power of the tale is by no means completely negative. To believe you are a princess when you are actually a beggar-girl may be dangerous, to be sure, and some frogs, when kissed, remain frogs. But Weldon's use of fairy-tale plots and motifs is also a way of honoring that tradition, of honoring women as tellers of tales, and ultimately a way of recognizing the human desire for magic and transformation that created those tales in the first place.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. "Bluebeard's Egg."
Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Bernikow, Louise.
Among Women
. New York: Harmony Books, 1980.
Carter, Angela.
The Bloody Chamber
. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Carter, Angela, ed.
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales
. London: Virago Press, 1990.
McCorkle, Jill. "Sleeping Beauty, Revised."
Crash Diet
. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1992.
Sage, Lorna.
Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists
. New York: Routledge, 1992.

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